Showing posts with label the existence of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the existence of God. Show all posts

17 February 2019

What Truly Exists?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Magritte’s iconic painting of a man looking in a mirror,
reminds us that the world we perceive is not real,
but rather constructed

A core question of ontology, or theories about the nature of being and existence—and perhaps its most pressing question from a practical point of view—is which individuals or 'things' are really real. What truly exists? It seems that there are three broad possibilities:
  • material entities alone (which is materialism),
  • mental entities alone (which is idealism),
  • or both (which is dualism).
However it is very difficult, as the cognitive scientist Aaron Sloman has put it, to distinguish between ‘real existents’ and ‘useful fictions’—or for that matter, useless ones. As philosophy professor Simon Blackburn notes:
‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers bent on keeping a firm check on reality—among them matter, force, energy, causes, physical laws, space, time, possibilities, numbers, infinity, selves, freedom of the will, the will itself, desires, beliefs, identity, things, properties, society, language, and money.’
Intuitively, we feel that what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch—or perceive in any way with our senses—is real. Yet what are we to make of things we do not perceive—either because, momentarily, we find that they lie beyond our senses, or because they are what we call ‘constructs'—compound ideas which may lack empirical evidence?

The problem strikes close to home. Take the one hundred most commonly used nouns in English. The first on the list is ‘time’. You cannot see it or touch it or anything like that. The second is ‘year’. The same applies. The third on the list is ‘people’. Now here is something we can see and touch—at least when those people happen to be around. The fourth term, though, ‘way’, is both real and unreal. And so, depending on how we categorise these nouns, fully half of them may not be ‘real’ at all.

It would be helpful to start with the simplest distinction—namely that which we make between real things we experience directly, and real things we do not.

Imagine that I am cycling down a narrow cycle track under some coconut palms. I see the world in front of me as I go—but do not see the world behind me. I saw it a moment ago—a thicket of breadfruit trees, and children playing. But I know that they are there. I saw them, heard them, smelled them. Besides, I could easily stop my bicycle now and look back to confirm it.


In what sense, then, are those things there, which are now behind me? After all, I do not directly perceive them.

We may conduct a simple thought experiment.

Imagine that, as I ride my bicycle under the coconut trees, we switch off my senses and freeze this moment in time. Without my senses, the perceived and the unperceived look largely the same in my brain—namely, arrangements of synapses in a vast network of neurons.

In my brain, then, there is little difference between the seen and the unseen (or the heard and the unheard, and so on). Both exist in the vast neural network which is or contains the mind. Everything, whether real or imaginary, ends up there. The question now is not so much whether my mind contains things perceived or unperceived. In the first case, my senses are activated; in the second, they are not—but in both cases, they are as real to me as anything possibly can be.

This becomes important now for the more vexing question as to how we are to understand constructs. There is more to riding my bicycle than what I see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. If there were not, I would be wobbling on my bicycle without anything left to orientate me:

Does this outing fit my purpose? Did I steal this bicycle? Do I need a passport here? Should I turn around now? And so on. None of these ‘surplus’ things—purpose, ownership, citizenship, and so on—is immediately real to me, yet all of them are vital. My mind is filled, not only with the things that I see, or saw a moment ago—but with many things which are in a sense unreal. One could say, things which are lacking empirical evidence, although in every case, they can be tested in some way.

Are these constructs real? In fact they are real—at least, as real as the coconut trees before me, and the breadfruit trees and the children behind me, given the fact that I arrange them, too, in my mind—each as a distinct concept with a unique label. As such, they do not fundamentally differ from those things which ‘exist’.

It would be wise for us to pause for a moment. We know well that we are capable, as human beings, of thinking of fictions which are not so. On the one hand, fictitious concepts—say magic spells, or the quintessence—on the other hand, fictitious entities—say the planet Vulcan, or fairies and gnomes. Sometimes, too, we believe that our fictions exist—or that they will exist at some time in the future.

Yet the separation of the real and the fictitious would seem to be fairly straightforward. ‘Real’ things correspond with the reality we perceive, while pure fictions do not. Does time therefore exist—or identity or society or any one of hundreds of thousands of constructs there are? Given that they correspond with the reality we perceive, we can only say yes.

The ultimate question is, does God exist? Given the right conditions, the answer to this, too, could be yes. The ‘right conditions’ for God’s existence would be threefold:
  • that he is not purely ideational
  • that the concept ‘God’ corresponds with the reality we perceive
  • and that this concept is not invoked arbitrarily.
Or put it this way—for God to exist, there needs to be something permanent in our experience which necessitates him.

21 August 2016

Revisiting Anselm's Ontological Argument

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

On the surface of it, Anselm's ontological argument seems to be absurd: One can think of nothing greater than God, therefore God exists. And yet our fascination with Anselm endures. What is this strange attraction?

Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD) was a medieval philosopher and theologian, who put forward the celebrated ontological argument for the existence of God. This has been discussed by many of the 'big names' in philosophy, including René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – and more recently by Charles Hartshorne, Karl Barth, and Alvin Plantinga, among others.

What is remarkable about Anselm's argument is that, while it would seem to have been refuted time and time again – beginning with Gaunilo of Marmoutiers in 1078 – it just keeps on bouncing back.

I propose that we may find an explanation for this abiding fascination with Anselm, if we assume (as was indeed the case) that Anselm did not have access to the postmodern language of epistemology – in particular, to the nonfoundationalism which we know today. What might his argument have looked like if he had?

But first, for the sake of completeness, the core of Anselm's original ontological argument, translated by Scott Moore:

Even the fool is compelled to grant that something greater than which cannot be thought exists in thought, because he understands what he hears, and whatever is understood exists in thought.

And certainly that greater than which cannot be understood cannot exist only in thought, for if it exists only in thought it could also be thought of as existing in reality as well, which is greater.

We shall pass over the detail of previous historical discussion, as this is not of special importance here. What is indeed important is just a single feature of Anselm's argument – namely, the word 'greater'. What does Anselm refer to with this word? A supreme being? A perfect being? A necessary being? What is he thinking is 'greater'?

The philosophy writer Chirag Mehta asks: what is the great-making property? Or more to the point, the linguist Michael Geis notes that adjectives such as 'greater' are normally relativised to some reference class. To put it simply, adjectives typically refer to something definite. But where is Anselm's reference class? It isn't there.

Supposing that we take a leap of intuition. Aristotle used the Greek word ἀξίουν (that which is worthy) to describe axioms. We know, too, that Anselm was well familiar with Aristotle's work. ἀξίουν is derived from the word ἄξιος (worth, or worthy), and it means 'a statement or proposition on which an abstractly defined structure is based'. 

Now let us suppose that Anselm intended to speak of something more worthy than which cannot be thought – in the sense of the ultimate Axiom – the Axiom which lies beneath all axioms: that Axiom which is 'more worthy' than all others. In keeping with this, let us drop Aristotle's word ἀξίουν into Anselm's work, so replacing Anselm's adjective 'greater':

Even the fool is compelled to grant that something more ἀξίουν (axiomatic) than which cannot be thought exists in thought, because he understands what he hears, and whatever is understood exists in thought.

And certainly that more ἀξίουν (axiomatic) than which cannot be understood cannot exist only in thought, for if it exists only in thought it could also be thought of as existing in reality as well, which is more ἀξίουν (axiomatic).

It will be seen that the replacement works. Perhaps therefore Anselm did not intend (seemingly absurdly) that one cannot conceive of anything greater than God. Perhaps he intended that God is the ἀξίουν beneath all axioms. Even if this was not his intention, it would seem to deliver an ontological argument.

With the rising tide of nonfoundationalismtoday, axioms are in trouble. We need foundations, yet we do not find them. The theologian Deane Galbraith notes that the problem today is not merely that our axioms are ungrounded, but that they are now 'grounded arbitrarily'. This implies, too, that we find ourselves in a great personal and social predicament.

There has to be an ἀξίουν, and it has to be an ἀξίουν which is more worthy than all others. How then might God represent that ἀξίουν? This lies beyond the scope of this simple post. Yet if this is what Anselm should have intended – namely, that we are in desperate need of the ultimate Axiom, then his argument may begin to make eminent sense.